Jump Then Fall
by ncfan
Summary: -Gaara x Sakura- "She was a hateful old woman." On death and opinions revised.


**Characters**: Sakura, Gaara, mentions of Chiyo, Naruto and Sasuke**  
Summary**: "She was a hateful old woman." On death and opinions revised.**  
Pairings**: GaaSaku**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

It is the fifth year to the day and the sky is shadowed with the rarest of all things to be found over Sunagakure: smoke gray storm clouds, threatening rain. Those who live here know well enough that it is more likely that they will have nothing but thunder and lightning, especially since there is no smell of rain on the wind, but they still hope for rain.

They still hope for anything at all.

Her fingers curl in the sand and she knows he's watching, standing just off, maybe two feet away. Close enough to provide support if needed, but not so close as to violate her personal space or give any possible spectators the indication of closeness. The picture of propriety towards her, as always.

Sakura turns green eyes (_too lifelike and yet too dead for this desert place_) on the small headstone: _Akasuna no Chiyo, elder, kunoichi, medic and puppet mistress of Sunagakure. _Below it, there is another inscription: _Honored one, you live on in the wind and empty places._

"She was a hateful old woman." Gaara's rasp echoes eerily in the silent air, and Sakura doesn't look at him at first, though she hears him, just as plainly as she ever does. "She couldn't be happy with anything in her life, no matter how incapable she was of changing it, nor how much she had brought it on herself."

That is the observation that makes her look at him.

In the five years since the one who lies dead beneath the earth now pulled his soul from the abyss, Gaara has changed but little in appearance. His hair is still as red as blood, his eyes, lacking pupils, just as sea foam green (_just like hers, too lifelike and too dead for the desert_), the rings around his eyes just as black, his skin just as moon-pale. He is perhaps a hairsbreadth taller at twenty than he was at fifteen and is still the fey child of the desert.

But he has changed. Sakura has too.

"How can you say that?" Where once there was fire in Sakura's anger, now there is only the smolder of cooling embers. The fire's had water put on it, and it's out now. "She saved your life."

"I merely speak the truth, Sakura." His voice is so utterly non-offensive that Sakura can't help but bristle.

"She was a great woman."

Pale eyes narrow. "Perhaps." Gaara breathes in deeply, nostrils flaring. "I remember her mostly as the elder who examined my seal from time to time to make sure her work wasn't coming undone, and as the woman who set up traps around her home to keep curious children away. I remember as the woman who enabled my mother's death, and my own transformation into a jinchuuriki."

Thunder rolls overhead, and a hot wind full of dry dust blasts their faces. Sakura stares down at the sand clutched in her hands. "Maybe," Sakura whispers. "But she wasn't just that. She wasn't the sum of choices that she admitted to be mistakes. You know that."

A cool, long-fingered hand rests on her shoulder, and Gaara has, in all silence, moved to stand over her. Sakura looks long at his hand, marveling at the feel of his skin—_cool and firm and callused_—against her own—_soft and still unformed despite the advent of her adulthood._ Then, she looks at him.

Gaara's eyes stare straight through her, piercing her flesh and looking at her as though he has known her all his life and she is simply transparent, so easy to read. "No, she was not, you are right.

"Chiyo-sama…" Again he is sucking in breath and Sakura's mouth twitches as she looks at him, the ghastly, pathetic parody of a sad, sympathetic smile convulsing on her lips. "…Chiyo-sama was an exemplary kunoichi during her active career in the field. Tales of her exploits have been told to children in Suna for decades; you can find accounts of battles she has fought with nin from all villages—from Tsunade-sama to Hanzo of the Ame—in any history book here in Suna.

"She may as well have written the book on Sunagakure medical care." Gaara licks his lips. "She wrote a large portion of the book for other villages as well."

Now, he's staring down at the headstone himself, and Sakura feels a rush of blood as Gaara's grip on her shoulder tightens—it's hard to tell if the sensation is the feeling of being disturbed or some primordial sense of pleasure rearing its head. "And she did know how to reverse her 'mistakes'," Gaara murmurs, voice barely audible.

Wind blows through them, and it's not dusty so much as thick and humid now. Sakura can feel a rock digging into her leg. She looks at Gaara, and she sees someone as utterly unlike the boy who tried to crush her with sand as anyone can be.

"I got your message." Gaara's voice is horribly flat now, but when he asks his next question, Sakura feels her heart seize at the waver in his tone. "Is it true?"

Nodding hurts her whole body. "Yes, it is." Her throat feels swollen, her eyes on the verge of tears but Sakura doesn't cry. She's dried out, wrung out—the years have been long and hard and she doesn't have it within her to cry, not anymore. "It's true."

"So Uzumaki Naruto is dead." A harsh note dissolves into the sky. "And Uchiha Sasuke still lives."

Again, Sakura nods even though it makes her body want to die.

Gaara tosses his head back and forth like a discomfited horse. "Years ago…" He is soft at his words again "… Years ago I offered him a chance to come back at the Kage Summit. I had been allowed redemption, and in my mind he deserved the same chance."

_Yes, the chance to jump, then fall and then finally find your footing on firmer ground. Except Sasuke's still falling, and he'll never find firmer ground._

"Now…" Gaara's voice fails "…Now… I only wish that I had killed him that day, so that all that has come to pass because of him would not have happened.

"I wish I had killed Sasuke, so that Naruto would still live."

And again, Sakura finds herself nodding. She thought she would never see this day, the day when she would genuinely wish Sasuke was dead. But she does—Naruto lies in the cold earth and Sasuke is still running with the lunatics and behaving the madman himself, and how she wishes the roles were reversed.

Naruto had the inner light, the indefinable something that made his life worth saving. How can darkness compare to that?

Another clap of thunder, hovering in the air nearly to the count of ten, comes, and behind it comes what Sunagakure was waiting for, what Sunagakure hasn't seen for nearly twenty years: the sound of liquid patter on the dunes, coming ever closer to Suna as the seconds passed and accompanied by a wind that is finally filled with the fresh smell of rain.

Gaara's hand slips to the crook of her arm. "We need to go inside, Sakura," he says quietly. "The storm will be here soon, and its strength will be equal to that of a sandstorm."

She gets up, and lets him accompany her back to the Kazekage's compound.


End file.
